On the Road: Mill Valley, California

Click on the Thumbnail for Map

Note: First published on Blogger on April 16, 2007

Unfolding the Map

Sorry I haven't posted, but the dissertation took front and center for awhile. However, I will get in a post once in awhile...besides, a slow journey is often better than a fast one! Click the map to see where we are now! Sal makes it here, to "Mill City" where he meets up with Remi Boncoeur at Remi's cabin where Remi lives with his girlfriend. Chapter 11 continues with a description of his time here, which included working as a "special policeman" at barracks for construction workers heading overseas, probably like a security guard. He spent many of his duty hours getting drunk with the workers. Sal also makes numerous trips into San Francisco, and hangs out with Remi on an abandoned freighter in the Bay.

According to a history of the Homestead Valley in Marin County, Kerouac actually lived with Gary Snyder for some months in a cabin on the property at 370 Montford in Mill Valley, where this marker is situated.

Book Quote

"Mill City, where Remi lived, with a collection of shacks in a valley, housing-project shacks built for Navy Yard workers during the war; it was in a canyon, and a deep one, treed profusely on all slopes. There were special stores and barber shops and tailor shops for the people of the project. It was, so they say, the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous a place I've never seen since."

On the Road, Chapter 11

Mill Valley

Mill Valley is one of those little Marin communities that to me was only a sign on the road as we zipped by, multiple times, on the way to San Francisco. I never paid much attention to it. I remember that as you got around the area where the Mill Valley sign was, there was a large building that I always liked to look at. It was very large, space-agey in its design, and pink, with a blue roof I think.  I later learned that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  I used to like to look at this building, partly because it meant that we were almost to the Golden Gate Bridge, and traveling over that was always a thrill for me.

We never really had any reason to stop anywhere in Marin County, unless we needed gasoline. We didn't know anybody there, and frankly, my parents were always uncomfortable stopping in places they didn't know very well. It was hilly, which meant that you couldn't always see the signs right away as you curved around the hills and went in and out of the depressions in the landscape.

My brother-in-law and his wife now life in San Anselmo, in Marin County, and now I have more familiarity with the place. Marin County is most likely not like how Kerouac and Sal experienced it in the late 40s. It tends to house a wealthier class of people, and a more environmentally conscious group of people. The people of Marin County that Sal describes -- rustic Italians and raucous construction workers, now most likely live in other, more blue-collar areas of the Bay Area. A recently proposed Habitat for Humanity project caused much consternation in Marin County, because even as the locals agree that housing should be available for low-income families, they worry about those low-income families depressing their own housing and property values.

Sal, however, given the household troubles between Remi and his girlfriend, as well as his job, finds Mill City a place from which he likes to escape. He spends a lot of time in San Francisco. Finally, Sal steals out in the middle of the night, leaving Remi and his girlfriend to their fate. "Remi and I were lost to each other...," he writes. He heads first for Oakland, and then south.

If you want to know more about Mill Valley

City of Mill Valley
Marin County Independent-Journal Mill Valley page
Mill Valley Film Festival
The Mill Valley Historical Society
Wikipedia: Mill Valley

Next Stop: Oakland

On the Road: Sausalito, California

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on October 15, 2006

Unfolding the Map

Sal has made it to San Francisco, and is now on his way to meet his friend Remi Boncoeur in Mill City. We will continue to follow him on his trip. Click on the image to follow along on the map, if you dare!

Book Quote

"I had just come through the little fishing village of Sausalito, and the first thing I said was, 'There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito.'"

On the Road, Chapter 11

The quote above is presented a little out of order from what happens in On the Road. In the book, Sal gets to Remi Boncoeur's cabin in Mill City, and then recounts going through Sausalito. But, in the interest of keeping the events right chronologically, I have presented his journey through Sausalito first, just as Sal and Jack experienced it.

Sausalito is known for the houseboats upon which rich Marin County dwellers live. These houseboats, however, are the legacy of something that I think Jack would have enjoyed and have been willing to take part in. In the 1950s, perhaps even before, people interested in living alternative lifestyles created these houseboat communities. They squatted on old boats tied together and created entire communities on the bay that existed on the fringes of society. These communities attracted bohemians and artists, and later hippies, as well as the requisite drugs, alcohol and free-wheeling lifestyles.

But in 1949, when Sal travels through, I think that Sausalito was probably just as he described it...a village full of Italian fishermen and their families. Though you have to wonder, for in the next sentence Remi Boncoeur laughs a knowing laugh...and you can almost hear him winking as he repeats Sal's line back to him, "There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito! Aaaaaaah!".

Of course, Sal would never recognize Sausalito now. The Italian fishing village is gone. Their successors, the bohemians and hippies who moved onto barely-floating junkers, are gone, replaced by dot.com millionaires who pay top dollar for these houseboats. The wild days of grass and booze and protest songs sung by circles of squatters are now replaced by the clinking of cocktail glasses and soft jazz. The sights and smells of an Italian fishing village are replaced by upscale shops that attract tourists with lots of money to burn.

Perhaps it is the circle of life. Everywhere you look, the fringe becomes hip. It doesn't matter what or where. Raw music of the sixties and seventies sells cars and computers today. Food and clothing styles, so common in one era, become the next generation's paragon of unhipness, only to be discovered anew two to three generations down the road and brought back into the limelight again.

Maybe once again, after a really bad economic downturn or social upheaval, the houseboats of Sausalito will once again be the haven of squatters and outcasts. Or maybe not. Perhaps Jack's comment about Sausalito revealed not only his surprise, but his ignorance of what was to come, and perhaps Remi's reply reveals more prescience than we expect.

If you want to know more about Sausalito

City of Sausalito
History of Sausalito
Houseboats of Sausalito
Wikipedia: Sausalito

Next stop: Mill City, California (Mill Valley?)